Get Thee to a Googlery

Google's book search engine has put together a William Shakespeare section, which in practice is a Web page where people can read a lot of Shakespeare's works, cover to cover.

The page was set up to coincide with the 50th summer of Shakespeare In The Park, the series of free performances in New York City's Central Park.

Google's neat little trick -- a virtual book shelf of all an author's work -- could easily be replicated using other authors.

As with anything having to do with Google's book search, copyright issues have come up. In the updated bit of this Google book search blog, it appears that Google has had to withhold some published versions of Shakespeare's plays.

Google wasn't immediately responding to an inquiry for this story. So it's difficult to assess whether the copyright mention in its June 13 blog posting was just boilerplate lawyerese, or the result of publishers balking at the unabridged view of their volumes that Google is providing.